Glow – Eindhoven nov 2011

This mysterious picture was taken at Glow – the Eindhoven light-and-art show I visited last saturday. Busy night: once we found the right starting point, we just followed the crowd. Nice to see so many people that’d never set foot in a museum looking at – and sometimes playing with – art.

Big gestures: Some interesting stuff done by lighting up the facades of buildings, f.ex. the van Abbe museum which was wrapped in flames by Xavier de Richemont. It was the opening act at the very first GLOW in 2006, and has been repeated because of great demand.

Interactive work: pic is from a project called Volume by United Visual Artists (UVA) , which consisted of many columns of light, each equipped with a speaker. Together, the columns form a futuristic labyrinth. The installation uses a camera system to track everyone that moves through it and converts these movements into a specific sound and light pattern. Everyone pulls his own trail through the installation and together the visitors create a totally unique audiovisual web.

Small gestures were also much appreciated, for example the glow-worms in the water under a weeping willow. Apparently, water is a common theme in the works of Jacqueline Verhaagen. For GLOW she has put dozens of LED-lights in the river Dommel.

from the GLOW website: Large amounts of sand and mud parts filter the bright white light from the LEDs and present them as green and yellow balls. The floating light bulbs cannot be separated from the muddy water and form an underwater world that Verhaagen compares with our subconscious: a mess of thoughts, memories and other mindscapes. The lights are programmed so that small clusters of light approach each other following different patterns. The way this is done derives from brain research. In thinking processes different brain areas connect to each other. To make this interaction visible and understandable, sometimes computer animations are made. Les terrains vagues is based on these kind of films.